


After Hours

by FifteenHundredPaperDragons



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam Parrish Loves Ronan Lynch, Established Relationship, Fluff, IKEA, M/M, Minor Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, Post-Canon, Ronan Is Full Of Bad Ideas, Sharing a Bed, Swearing, bc ronan, weird bonding experiences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-29
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-29 12:37:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14472930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FifteenHundredPaperDragons/pseuds/FifteenHundredPaperDragons
Summary: "We can't just trash an Ikea, there's security cameras and- and stuff!""We're not going totrashit."Wherein bad choices lead Adam Parrish and Ronan Lynch to get stuck in an Ikea overnight, and Ronan sees a golden opportunity.





	After Hours

**Author's Note:**

> "'we somehow got stuck overnight in an ikea and I just want to go to sleep in one of the display beds but you're slowly convincing me that it'd be fun to see how much shit we can get into before the morning staff come to open the store' AU"-AU and OTP ideas of Pure Awesomeness on tumblr  
> A Pynch one-shot featuring improbable Ikea antics

"We can't just trash an Ikea, there's security cameras and- and stuff!" Adam Parrish, a mostly reasonable citizen, said with an air of annoyance.

"We're not going to _trash_ it," replied Ronan Lynch, a mostly unreasonable citizen. "Also, we're still here, so security's obviously really fucking awful. Also, it'll be fun." 

"No. No way. That sounds all kinds of stupid. If anything goes wrong it's obviously our fault. I'm going to sleep." 

"Fucking unbelievable. Wasting this opportunity to sleep in a lumpy display bed that's never been washed and is probably full of gross shit."

"Ooh, you're really selling this place. Can't wait to go have an adventure in all of the gross, unwashed shit."

"Stop being a dickhead and come crash a shopping cart into a wall with me."

Adam looked at Ronan for a moment, weighing his options. He was tired, yes, but he was always tired. This evening was exceptional in plenty of ways, but Adam's sleep deprivation wasn't one of them. Besides, if they made a bit of a racket they'd probably be found sooner. And Ronan, well, Ronan could be pretty convincing if he wanted to be. He was a walking interrogation cell: relentless sharp edges and blinding lights. Usually people were intimidated enough by his his scowl and his perennially standoffish attitude, and if that didn't do it a thinly veiled threat would. But these scare tactics were useless on Adam, and Ronan knew better than to try them. He had other methods, when he needed them. Methods that may or may not have involved bribery with odd but surprisingly heartfelt dream-gifts and/or neck kisses. 

"Well..." Adam said, even though he'd already made up his mind. 

"Come on, Parrish, this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to do all the crazy shit you think of doing in this place. Climb the shelves, rearrange the displays, play in the ball pit, whatever we want."

"Okay. Fine. On one condition."

"And that is?"

"No damages. We are not trashing this place, Ronan Lynch, and it doesn't matter to me how much those long lines and broccoli stuffed animals and forbidden ladders might get you all riled up. Don't break anything."

Ronan laughed. It was a quiet laugh, more of a snort. Normally these laughs were derisive, but this one was for Adam and was accompanied by an uneven smile, an outstretched hand, and only a touch of mockery. They shook on it, then he tugged Adam to his feet and off down the dimly-lit aisle. 

Their first stop was the warehouse. They found a couple shopping carts and raced up and down the wide aisles. At first they were unexciting races: Adam was worried about attracting a security guard and Ronan, though he didn't admit it, was worried about Adam worrying. But after a good few minutes and a couple aisles, they were shouting and laughing and crashing into boxes and shooting down rows at top speed. Ronan's cart tended to veer left and they crashed into one another a fair few times. The first time that they ended up sprawled on the floor, laughing, Adam was reminded of the day they raced that old shopping cart around the parking lot. It couldn't have been that long ago, but it felt like a lifetime had passed since then. They'd found the spinning chairs afterward and then pushed one another around, carts long forgotten. By the time they decided to call it quits they had raced along nearly all the aisles and were exhausted from all the running. 

"What now?" Adam had said, slumped against a flat-packed wardrobe. Ronan had simply pointed up. That was all he needed: a silent agreement was quickly made. 

It took them a while to figure out the mechanics of climbing. Ronan was taller-- he had the advantage there-- but Adam got the hang of things more quickly and ended up scaling the warehouse shelf far ahead of Ronan. He looked down over the edge, swallowing back a wave of vertigo and waving at the climbing figure below. Ronan responded with a rude gesture, which was offered an extra whiff of danger by the fact that he was briefly dangling by one hand 20 feet off the floor. 

Things were different at the top, and that wasn't a Blue-ish commentary on the self-enforcing nature of existing power structures: he meant it literally. There was a fine layer of dust coating everything: like snow, but worse, he thought. It was colder above than on the ground, too, although it had to be only some twenty feet's difference. And things seemed more real from above, somehow. The Ikea showroom was a mess of fake rooms in fake houses and people with fake smiles plastered on their faces. Up above the empty warehouse it was an entirely different world. Adam liked it better up here. 

It took Ronan a few seconds to catch up. He swung himself over the top, creating a cloud of the remaining dust. He immediately gazed over the edge, and then gave a calculating glance at the next shelf over. Adam could see him trying to figure out the distance between the shelves, and whether or not he could jump that distance without dying tragically on the cement floor of a furniture store. Adam thought the distance was pretty obviously non-jump-able, but it was best for everyone not to risk it. This was when Ronan needed a distraction the most, and nowadays the task of providing that distraction often fell to Adam. It was a lot of responsibility. He reached out and carefully took Ronan's hand, lacing their fingers together. Ronan looked down at their hands in surprise, then up at Adam with a little smirk. Oh, he knew the effects of that smirk-- he had to. Adam's heart skipped a beat just about every time, which was sappy and dumb but he couldn't help it. That was one thing that had managed to stay true about Adam-- he was a romantic at heart. Ronan Lynch had no excuse to be this nice to look at: statuesque, but like someone had chiseled him from sharp marble and never finished sanding out the edges. 

Adam held Ronan's hand like it was a fragile thing, as though too strong of a grip would break something important inside. And Ronan, he held Adam's hand like he was drowning and it was the only thing keeping him afloat. The warehouse stretched out beneath them, the only two living souls in a cold expanse of cheap home goods.  
They sat like that for a while, together, hands interlaced and feet dangling over the edge of the shelf. At least for a little while, they were the gods of this domain, this high-ceilinged warehouse which felt a lot colder than the warehouse they were used to. After a while, Ronan started getting restless and Adam started getting sleepy and they decided it was probably best to climb down. They set off on a dangerous path over the edge. Ronan jumped about the last ten feet, which Adam was tempted to scold him for but decided not to. It was his own fault if he broke his legs (or his spine) in an Ikea.

Climbing shelves and racing desk chairs could have been enough excitement for Adam's taste, but Ronan was looking for more. The "As-Is" section seemed to call to him from its dejected little corner of the warehouse. They made their way over, and Ronan stood and surveyed the options. It wasn't clear what he was surveying for, exactly, but it seemed the best course of action would be to let him do his thing. Adam checked his texts as Ronan moved through the rows of furniture, inspecting each item like potential prize-winning livestock. 

Adam still couldn't understand how people took their cell phones for granted. He'd had his for a relatively short period, sure, but it seemed the novelty hadn't worn at all from the day he got it. His only new text was from Gansey, and it was blank save for a single emoji which he thought might be a disappointed face. For once, it was probably justified.

This whole adventure was really Ronan's fault, or maybe Henry's. Henry had been the one to suggest hide-and-seek. And Ronan had been the one to hide for hours, refusing to answer his phone or abandon his hiding place. It was just Henry and Adam against an entire superstore's worth of places to look. The staff couldn't very well be asked to help, since hide-and-seek was strictly forbidden. Neither Gansey nor Blue had accepted their offer to come along in the first place: Blue thought the place was the picture of rampant, environment-destroying capitalism, and Gansey, though too polite to admit it outright, hated all the cheaply-made furniture. (He'd sat on and subsequently broken an Ikea couch once, way back when. Neither Ronan nor Noah had let him live it down, and to this day Ronan would probably work in a dig about the Amazing Collapsing Couch when they next spoke.)

Ronan was inside a bathroom cabinet, as it turned out. Adam found him there in the half-light of the night hours after spending a good ten minutes in a sofa hiding from the evening inspection. He'd given Ronan a stony look and the two of them had set off through the empty store as Adam replied to Gansey's increasingly worried texts (and a couple missed calls) with an assurance that Ronan was all right: just a dumbass with a hyper-competitive streak (nothing new). He told Henry that Ronan had been hiding in a cabinet, and then, on the off chance that they weren't all in the same place, he texted Blue a quick message about the situation. Ronan looked like he wanted to say something, but Adam ignored him, instead dismissing Gansey's threats to get them out of the store in all manner of ridiculous and probably expensive ways. They'd be fine for the evening, he'd assured him. It didn't take much to convince Gansey (and Blue by extension, and probably Henry too) to watch Opal overnight. (Gansey's maternal instincts were stronger than anyone else Adam knew, except perhaps Maura Sargent.) Adam told him the plan to hole up somewhere in a display bed, then explain the situation the next morning with a few modifications to shed them in a more sympathetic light. Adam's mind, on instinct, was always running with elaborate excuses; he'd spend the evening concocting something reasonable before he got to sleep. He neglected to mention the part about their various misadventures, both the ones they'd already had and the ones still in store.  
 Gansey had accepted this decision, but it seemed he wasn't too pleased with it. Well, Gansey wasn't the one having Ikea adventures with his boyfriend, so he couldn't possibly understand how it wasn't such a bad decision after all.

"This one!" called Ronan, drawing Adam's attention away from his phone. He was standing over by the edge of the section, pointing to an unremarkable-looking bed. 

"That one what?" Adam asked, just avoiding tripping over a floor lamp cord as he made his way over to where Ronan stood.

"We're jumping on this bed, and it's going to be fucking great so don't question me."

"We agreed not to break anything. Pretty sure two grown-- well, two eighteen-year-old boys jumping on a bed would break it. I don't want to pull something like Gansey and that couch."

Ronan snorted, no doubt remembering the fateful incident, but didn't miss a beat. "We won't be breaking anything. It's already broken. Broken enough that we can't make it worse and they won't charge any less."

Adam was skeptical. He was pretty sure jumping on a broken bed would definitely make it more broken, and that there was no way they could sell an entirely broken bed at all. He said so.

"Shit, Parrish, can't you just accept that I'm a master of all things Ikea? It'll be fine." 

"You'd better be right," Adam said, and took off his shoes. Sometimes it scared him how much trust he put in Ronan Lynch, street-racing, monster-dreaming, car-crashing daredevil extraordinaire. But usually it didn't, not when he remembered every soft expression to cross Ronan Lynch's hard face, the way Ronan looked at him when he thought Adam couldn't see. 

The bed did make a few disconcerting cracking and popping noises, and at one point the whole mattress seemed to shift a bit, but it stood up to them better than either had expected. And it was fun, much more fun than Adam thought it would be. He couldn't remember ever having jumped on the bed before: he'd jumped on a friend's couch once, back in elementary school, but that was the extent of it. But oh, it was like a trampoline but better, somehow-- maybe because it wasn't designed for this but was perfect anyway, maybe because it was always drilled into children's heads not to jump on the bed, maybe because Ronan was there and taking it very seriously, maybe because it was just so ridiculous that Adam had to laugh and then he couldn't stop laughing. He laughed until his chest hurt, and it'd been so long since he'd laughed like that  it felt like his face was cracking. He laughed until he couldn't laugh anymore, and then Ronan kissed him. 

What a life it was, to be a careless, aimless teenager, full of confidence like you could take on the whole world and so wholly unbothered by the crushing weight of the universe. Adam glimpsed it, sometimes-- usually in other people, although there were moments where he could taste it himself. This was one of those moments: standing on a bed in a giant, empty department store, kissing Ronan Lynch amidst the skeletons of thousands of pieces of cheap furniture, his chest aching from laughter. The world could be burning, for all they cared: they were teenagers, and this was the only moment that mattered.

It ended, as all moments do, and they broke apart, put their shoes back on, and decided to head back into the showroom portion of the store. They made their way past the shelves of fake houseplants (which were deemed to be dumb, by unanimous vote) and into the picture frames. Adam got a map from one of the kiosks, just in case they managed to get lost following the one twisting path through the whole store. They passed though frames and rugs, taking a shortcut into lighting.

The lighting department was Adam's favorite; he thought it looked kind of like the night sky, all lit up with billions of tiny points of light. That was a rather romantic, Gansey-like thought to have, and he knew it. He was getting soft, but there wasn't much to do about it (and anyway he didn't really mind). 

"They really leave all of these lights on, all night long? Those bastards couldn't care less about this planet if they tried!" Ronan said, and if Adam was thinking like Gansey then Ronan was definitely thinking like Blue. 

"Aww, a real environmental activist. Blue would be proud," Adam said, and Ronan scoffed and flipped him off.

"I'll go smash some of those stupid houseplants, then she and I can be on normal terms again." 

"Normal terms being you pretend to hate each other but just make fun of the rest of us behind our backs? And the one ground rule is to not destroy stuff. That's the one rule, Ronan."

Ronan rolled his eyes but didn't confirm or deny anything. The dramatic lighting made every one of his sharp features even sharper, multicolored beams of light creating an odd relief. Adam couldn't stop looking at him: even if he tried to be inconspicuous, he ended up staring, watching the changing light play across Ronan's face as they walked along.

"What the fuck are you looking at, Parrish?"

"What does it look like, Lynch?" he shot back. 

"My pretty, pretty face?"

"Yeah. Your pretty, pretty face."

Ronan smiled. It was sharp and wolflike, too, but it managed to make him even more entrancing. _Boy,_ thought Adam. _I'm in deep._ He tried not to let it frighten him too much. It was hard not to be scared, remembering Blue and their ill-fated relationship: how much he'd hurt then (and how badly he'd dealt with it), and how much more absolutely head over heels he was for Ronan Lynch than he'd ever managed to be for Blue Sargent. And then again, it was hard to be afraid with Ronan on your side. He seemed to always be spitting a dare at the world, a dare to 'come get me if you think you can' thrown at the universe's feet. 

Ronan Lynch himself was looking to pick a fight with all of creation, which might have been a suitable explanation for why he was suddenly launching himself into a large metal basket of giant, smiling stalks of broccoli. While Adam was thinking, off on his own planet, Ronan had spotted his mortal enemy and made a beeline. The basket, now holding the weight of approximately 200 additional stuffed broccoli and the misdirected fury of a teenage boy with a vendetta, made a sound of protest but managed to hold. Adam raised startled eyebrows and watched as Ronan surfaced like a dolphin, launching stuffed toys to kingdom come. 

"What-?" Adam couldn't articulate his thoughts, nor his absolute confusion. "Ronan, what?"

"There is no reason for a vegetable to be a stuffed toy. No fucking reason. Why does this shit exist? What child would be happy with this?"

"It might come as a surprise to you, but not all of us got to have stuffed toys made of velvet and money and dreams," Adam said, and maybe he was a little bitter but he was also more than a little tired. "I'd be happy with some happy broccoli."

Ronan grunted, which was his way of saying "point taken" without having to actually admit defeat. "Mostly I just wanted to jump into a big-ass basket of stuffed animals. It's as good as it seems."

"I'm not getting in there with you. No way."

"Well, damn, Parrish, now you mention it..." he said, waggling his eyebrows.

"No, that's a very bad idea. I'm vetoing this one. That's stupid." 

Ronan threw a broccoli at him, and then tossed another while he was distracted with the first. Adam looked down at the fallen toy, and when he looked back up a third smiling broccoli hit him square between the eyes. He startled, flinching violently; it hadn't hit him very hard at all, but the surprise of it had thrown him for a nasty loop. Ronan recognized this, recognized his mistake, and looked almost as though he was considering an apology. He opened his mouth to say something, and got a toy dog to the teeth for his efforts. Just like that, it was all-out war.

Ronan had the advantage of sitting in a box of ammunition, but Adam could duck behind things much more easily, could pop up somewhere unexpected and fire off a stuffed owl. Admittedly, they were acting like toddlers, but Adam's competitive streak could go toe to toe with any Olympian and Ronan never let go of a grudge. They finished in a stalemate of sorts, but Adam was sure that he'd won: Ronan had managed to throw every one of the broccoli out of his basket, and now he was ammo-less and also slightly stuck. Adam decided to be a good sport and show mercy. He wanted Ronan on his good side, not just in general but in that particular moment. The area was absolute carnage, stuffed toys of all order and species scattered like shrapnel, and Adam was not going to clean it up alone. Ronan was removed, with some reluctance, from where he stood in the giant box and they got to work.

Their little battle had been fun, but at what cost? Between finding all the projectiles and sorting them into their appropriate shelving areas, it took them twenty-some minutes to tidy the whole thing up. When the last broccoli hit the bin, Ronan clapped his hands and said,   
"All this work has left me feeling rather peckish," except he was Ronan so it came out as, "Well now I'm fucking hungry!" 

Adam replied with, "That seems a little unreasonable, and is sort of an entitled-sounding demand, but I like you and will accompany you to wherever you propose we find food," except he was Adam so it came out as, "Okay. Fine. Whatever. Let's find some food."

They set off.

Food was found in the form of a basket of cookies. Adam didn't think that really counted as a meal, and Ronan had something rude to say about that. He picked up one of the boxes of ginger snaps and pulled it open.

"That's stealing," said Adam. "You're committing theft."

"Yeah. Want one?" Ronan held out the box and rattled it in invitation. 

"I'm not being made an accessory to this crime!"

"Oh, fuck off, Parrish. I'll pay for it later. Let me have my cookies in peace," he said, crunching on four or five of said cookies at once. 

"Of course you'll pay for it later. This whole thing's a game! Nothing we do here matters to you, because come morning you can pay for whatever! Broke a bed in the as-is section? Stole some cookies? Trashed a giant furniture store? Let me get my platinum credit card and make it all go away." Adam said, speaking longer and louder than he meant to. Years of pent-up bitterness, no matter how pent-up, had a funny habit of leaking out sometimes. He meant it, but at the same time he didn't really. 

"Shut the hell up! We haven't done any damage here, except to these three-dollar cookies. And you've established yourself as an accessory pretty well at this point, so you can get off your fucking high horse."

"Point taken. I still resent everyone that has ever or will ever attend Aglionby."

"So do I, and yet we both went and fucking did it. Man, what kind of dumbass goes to a school he hates?" 

He decided not to point out that Ronan had just called himself a dumbass, or bring up the fact that he didn't hate Aglionby, just the boys that went there, or explain that their reasons for attending were so fundamentally different there couldn't be a comparison. These were all ways to carry on arguing, which he didn't want to do. He decided to just roll with it, and said with all the false drama he could muster, "You wound me, sir."

"Want me to kiss it better?" Ronan smirked. 

"Asshole," Adam said fondly. 

"Bastard," Ronan replied, and he might as well have called him "darling" for all the malice it held. Then he proceeded to cram a handful of brittle, wafer-like ginger biscuits into his mouth. He offered the mostly empty box to Adam, one last time, and a begrudging Adam accepted a  single cookie. They were crispier than expected, but they were rather good. He'd have tried another, given the opportunity. He wasn't given the opportunity: Ronan proceeded to consume the final few servings of cookies in one go and tossed the box away. It hit the edge of the trash and fell right in, which earned a gross, cookie-eating grin. Adam wrinkled his nose and looked away, which he hoped was comment enough on Ronan's abysmal manners. It wasn't, apparently: when Adam turned back around, Ronan was chewing with his mouth open. He noticed Adam's glance and made direct, unblinking eye contact. So he knew he was being rude. Of course he did; he knew that all the time. 

"Ronan, gross," he said for good measure. "Watch your manners." They started walking as Ronan finished chewing. It was actually rather late at this point, and Adam wanted nothing more than a moderately comfortable display bed. 

"Oh dear, my manners!" said Ronan in a falsetto, fanning himself with one hand; Adam couldn't help but laugh. He could imagine this was the sort of stupid thing Ronan did before Niall had died, not that he'd ever say that out loud. Ronan still had bits of cookie stuck to his teeth. "How could you ever forgive me?" Ronan shrilled, then focused in with a shark-like grin. Adam smiled the tiniest fraction, and they made eye contact long enough that they would have raised eyebrows from hypothetical passers-by. 

Adam cleared his throat, looking away. "...okay then," he said. "Bedrooms coming up right around the bend. I'm going to sleep, and this time it's non-negotiable."

There were all manner of display rooms, made up with various furniture themes and target audiences. Adam, exhausted, set his sights on the closest bedroom, which happened to be a red-and-grey, vaguely racecar-themed affair with a twin sized bed tucked in the corner. Ronan peeled off and headed in a different direction, prowling the bedrooms with what had to he a deliberate and intense eye. He passed over a lovely lime-and-dark wood themed apartment and a blue-themed bachelor's pad, pausing briefly at the nature-themed little kids' room with the giant leaf. Adam smiled and kicked off his shoes, leaving them neatly at the edge of the bed as he wiggled his way into the bedding. He rolled and tossed, trying to cultivate some comfort (to no avail). Ronan came back around the corner, spotted him, and approached with the same determination he always showed in the face of his enemies/authority figures/friends/encounters with mall  salespeople. 

"This bed? Are you fucking kidding me? This is the most pathetic bed in this whole store!" Ronan laughed, absently tossing one of the bed's own throw pillows at the empty wall like he was skipping a stone on a lake. The admittedly small and worn-looking pillow hit the wall with a thud and the ground without much sound at all. Adam rolled his eyes but sat up and swung his legs off the side of the bed. "Man, who chooses a shitty twin-sized bed on the floor in the corner of an even shittier kids' room when there's a whole furniture store out there?"

"You have my attention, Ronan," Adam said drily. "I won't sleep in this 'shitty little twin-sized bed' if you've got a much better solution."

Ronan offered his hand to Adam, who took it, and the two of them headed for the bedroom furniture showroom. Even dim as it was, there were plenty of lights on to guide the way. The pathways wound aimlessly through racks of stuffed animals (they tried not to look at the stuffed animals-- war flashbacks, as it were) and measuring cups and napkins until they emerged into the bed-filled expanse. There were queen-sized beds sporting the finest in Ikea bedding and kids' beds in gently themed rooms and the ever-elusive bunk and loft beds, sheer plastic blocking access the ladder. 

"Okay, I guess you win," Adam said, taking a seat on a queen sized bed laden with all number of unnecessary pillows. "This is better than that little twin bed. Fine." 

"Yeah. Not to mention all our adventures. And you would've fallen asleep in the Little Shitty Bed hours ago and missed out on all this fun." 

"I said fine," said Adam, but without malice. This had been fun: oddly, bizarrely fun, against his every expectation of Ikea (not to mention Ikea as a couple or Ikea after dark or, god forbid, both). He was ready to go to sleep properly now, and had just about taken off his shoes and passed out in the display bed he currently occupied when he saw Ronan catch sight of his newest prey.

Every Ikea had at least one loft bed, and every kid wanted one at some point. Every kid also wanted to climb into said loft bed, a legal hazard which led to the installation of plastic barriers on each and every bed with a stepladder. Of course, if you were eighteen and dedicated, this piece of plastic didn't do much. Ronan had made his way up into the bed in a matter of seconds. He beckoned to Adam, then made a rude gesture when the latter let out a long-suffering and very audible sigh before getting up and heading toward the bunk bed. 

"Get a fucking move on, Parrish. Come over here and sleep with me," Ronan said. Adam paused in his tracks, his eyebrows darting directly into his hairline like startled rabbits back to the undergrowth. Noticing this, Ronan added, "Obviously not like that, dipshit," but his face was a few shades redder than before. Adam bit back the little awkward laugh bubbling in his throat and continued. 

He made his way up into the loft bed with a little more difficulty and a little more exhaustion than Ronan had. The bed itself was another twin and not particularly comfortable. There wasn't space for the both of them side by side, which led to some awkward shimmying about and a series of protesting pops and screeches from the bed frame. Adam found himself with his head in the crook of Ronan's shoulder (he couldn't complain) and their limbs a tangle. Within minutes, however, Adam was asleep, his expression far more relaxed than in wakefulness. It took years off him, Ronan thought; he looked more like a high school boy without the weight of the world on his shoulders.   
It took Ronan longer to fall asleep. He wasn't worried, but he kept thinking about what they'd do once morning came and the employees arrived to open the store, only to find two teenagers sleeping in a twin-sized bunk bed. Surely they'd think of some excuse. Knowing Adam, he'd already thought up some clever way to explain their presence there, some way to shift the blame around a bit. It was probably best not to concern himself with it. It was rare for him to worry-- he'd done objectively dumber and more ridiculous things and it'd all been fine. Adam's tendency to worry was rubbing off on him, it seemed. He sighed and put it out of his mind.  
Ronan watched the steady rise and fall of Adam's chest and studied the details of his face. One of the lights somewhere was gently changing colors. He watched the light play across the ceiling and thought about the evening and eventually, finally, he too was asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> not one person beta'd this because i'm full of hubris and social anxiety but lmk if there's anything i could do better, i appreciate any and all feedback :)


End file.
